The Archaeology of Global Environment Change

Recent, widely recognized changes in the Earth system are, in effect, changes in the coupled human–environment system. We have entered the Anthropocene, when human activity—along with solar forcing, volcanic activity, precession, and the like—must be considered a component (a ‘driver’) of global environmental change (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Levin 1998). The dynamic non-linear system in which we live is not in equilibrium and does not act in a predictable manner (see Fairhead, chapter 16 this volume for further discussion of non-equilibrium ecology). If humankind is to continue to thrive, it is of utmost importance that we identify the ideas and practices that nurture the planet as well as our species. Our best laboratory for this is the past, where long-, medium-, and short-term variables can be identified and their roles evaluated. Perhaps the past is our only laboratory: experimentation requires time we no longer have. Thus the integration of our understanding of human history with that of the Earth system is a timely and urgent task. Archaeologists bring two particularly useful sets of skills to this enterprise: how to collaborate, and how to learn from the past. Archaeology enjoys a long tradition of collaboration with colleagues in both the biophysical sciences and in the humanities to investigate human activity in all planetary environments. Archaeologists work alongside one another in the field, live together in difficult conditions, welcome collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines—and listen to them carefully—and tell compelling stories to an interested public. All are rare skills and precious opportunities. Until recently few practitioners of biophysical, social science, and humanities disciplines had experience in cross-disciplinary collaboration. Many scholars who should be deeply engaged in collaboration to avert disaster (for example, specialists in tropical medicine with their counterparts in land use change) still speak different professional ‘languages’ and have very different traditions of producing information. C. P. Snow, in The Two Cultures (1993 [1959]), was among the first to warn that the very structure of academia was leading to this serious, if unintended, outcome.

Archaeology and Environmental Anthropology: Collaborations in Historical and Political Ecology

This chapter examines the importance of integrating archaeological perspectives within contemporary environmental anthropology. It does this through exposing key questions raised by environmental anthropologists concerning West African relations with soil and forests that can only be addressed through collaboration with archaeological investigation (see also Balée, Chapter 3 this volume). Environmental anthropological research has been particularly important in revealing the ecological knowledge and environmental practices of land users and how these practices interplay with ecological and economic processes in the shaping of landscapes. This research has systematically undermined a paradigm of environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’, ‘equilibrial’, or ‘pristine’ environments (whether of soils, forests, or faunal assemblages). Whilst equilibrial ecology is apparently no longer upheld in ecological sciences either, in its shift to non-equilibrium ecology and recognition of path dependency, and whilst nature is no longer so easily configured simply as the absence of people, assumptions rooted in such simplistic ideas of nature still strongly inform and mislead the way West African environments are understood and problematized. Anthropologically derived critiques of the way landscapes are understood have been associated with a rereading of the history of those landscapes. Yet given how oral historical and anthropologically derived historical evidence can so easily be delegitimized and dismissed by apparently ‘harder’ sciences, environmental archaeology becomes a crucial player in these debates. In this brief chapter I shall focus on two key debates which can only be resolved (or reconceptualized) through environmental archaeology. The first of these concerns the degradation (or otherwise) of soils and vegetation linked to farming in West Africa’s Guinea savannah and forest-savannah transition zones. The second concerns the legacy of past land use on current ‘old growth’ forest in the Central and West African humid forest zones. These are not only interesting debates, but are at the heart of sustainable development policy deliberation in West Africa. The continued power of the paradigm in environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ environments is visible in the way that landscape features are often interpreted uncritically as ‘relicts’ of that nature.

Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics: Lessons from the Past for the Future

As the twenty-first century winds onward, it is becoming increasingly clear that understanding how climate affects human cultural systems is critically important. Indeed, it has been argued by many researchers that how we respond to changing global climate is one of the greatest scientific and political challenges facing our planetary technological civilization, comparable and closely intertwined with concerns about biological or nuclear warfare, famine, disease, overpopulation, or environmental degradation. By any reasonable evaluation of the evidence, this century, and likely the several centuries that follow it, will be characterized by dramatic climate change, perhaps as significant in terms of its impact on our species as any climatic episodes that have occurred in the past. What we don’t know with much certainty is how these environmental changes will play out across the planet, and how individuals as well as nation states will respond to them. Archaeology has a major role to play in helping us move through this period of crisis, however, by showing us how human cultures in the past responded to dramatic changes in climate. As the work of many archaeological scholars has shown, climate change has not invariably proven to be a bad thing: it is how people respond to it that is critical (e.g. Anderson et al. 2007b; Cooper and Sheets 2012; Crumley 2000, 2006, 2007; Hardesty 2007; McAnany and Yoffee 2010; McIntosh et al. 2000; Redman 2004a; Sandweiss and Quilter 2008; Sassaman and Anderson 1996; Tainter 2000). Archaeology working in tandem with a host of palaeoenvironmental and historical disciplines has lessons for our modern world and, as this volume demonstrates, we as a profession are making great strides in getting our message out. Perhaps the most important lesson from the past is that people, through their actions, are the drivers of cultural change, including response to climate change. Societies are not, however, monolithic entities that ‘chose’ to succeed or fail; people as individuals, groups, or factions through their actions generate outcomes, and often some demonstrate remarkable flexibility and resilience (Cooper and Sheets 2012; Diamond 2005; McAnany and Yoffee 2010).

Memories and Expectations of Environmental Disaster: Some Lessons from the Marshall Islands

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, an archipelago of low-lying coral atolls in eastern Micronesia, is one of four sovereign nations that may be rendered uninhabitable by climate change in the present century. It is not merely sea level rise which is expected to undermine life in these islands, but the synergy of multiple climatic threats (Barnett and Adger 2003). Rising oceans and increasingly frequent typhoons will exacerbate flooding at the same time that the islands’ natural protection—coral reefs—will die from warming waters and ocean acidification. Fresh water resources will be threatened by both droughts and salt contamination from flooding. Although the reaction of the coral atoll environment to climate change is uncertain, it is likely that the islands will no longer be able to support human habitation within fifty or a hundred years (Barnett and Adger 2003: 326)—quite possibly within the lifetimes of many Marshall Islanders living today. In the public imagination, climate change in vulnerable, remote locations is the intrusion of contamination into a formerly pristine environment, of danger into a once secure sanctuary, of change into a once static microcosm (see Lynas 2004: 81, 124). Archaeologists, of course, know better than this: every place has a history of environmental upheavals, and the Marshall Islands is no exception. Researchers agree that coral atolls are among the most precarious and marginal environments that humans have managed to inhabit (Weisler 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 27), existing only ‘on the margins of sustainability’ (Weisler 2001). The islands in fact only recently formed: while the reefs are tens of millions of years old, the islets that sit on them emerged from the sea only recently, probably around 2000 BP (Weisler et al. 2000: 194; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2), just before the first people arrived (Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2). The new home that these early seafarers found was not so much an ancient safe haven as a fragile geological experiment—land whose very existence was tenuous long before humans were altering the global climate.

Past and Present Farming: Changes in Terms of Engagement

In archaeology, changes in human–animal relationships are rarely considered beyond the moment of domestication. This is influenced by Ingold’s idea that domestication led to a shift in the human engagement with animals (Ingold 2000: 61–76; see Armstrong Oma 2007: 62–4, 2010 for critique). I do not question the validity of such a claim; however, I argue that changes in terms of engagement also happened beyond domestication, and that various configurations of human–animal relationships have existed throughout history. Further, I argue that such changes also have consequences for the environment, by choice of land use strategies and husbandry regimes. A twofold purpose is pursued: first, to investigate how changes in social systems, in my case changes in terms of engagement between humans and animals, affect land use in such a way as to impinge upon natural systems and ecosystems. Second, I wish to grasp the political underpinnings of the models that are employed by archaeologists and, by doing so, to deconstruct the political use of the past (see also Stump, Chapter 10 this volume). Alternative models regarding economic strategies are sought, and the implications of these are discussed. Human–environment studies frequently deal with the impact of human intrusive land use strategies on ecosystems. Awareness has been created around these processes regarding land use techniques and practices (for example Denham and White 2007; Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). However, in European archaeology the impact of husbandry practices upon ecosystems has received considerably less, if any, attention. People in past societies from the Neolithic onwards made the conscious decision to live with animals as herders or as farmers, blending together social and economic choices that had repercussions for landscape developments and ecosystems. Investigations into the relationship between environmental changes caused by husbandry practices and the social systems that instigated those changes are an important contribution to research on past environmental development. These changes are identifiable in the archaeological record.

The Role of Agricultural and Environmental History in East African Developmental Discourse

The past, or the perception of the past, plays a pivotal role in the formation of modern policies on land-use, since the rhetoric of conservation favours the protection of ‘ancient’ or ‘pristine’ landscapes, whilst the focus on economic or environmental sustainability has led to the endorsement of apparently long-lived ‘indigenous’ practices, especially where these appear to have permitted extended periods of cultivation whilst conserving local soil, water, and forest resources. Focusing on examples of locally developed intensive agriculture from Kenya and northern Tanzania, this chapter aims to highlight how the history of landscape management in these areas—although still poorly understood—continues to be cited within developmental and conservationist debates. It will outline how a combination of archaeological, historical, and palaeoenvironmental research might be employed to produce a more complete understanding of these agronomies, and argues that work of this kind is essential to qualify the historical assumptions that have been used to justify external intervention. The invocation of historical arguments in support of either economic intervention or wildlife conservation is not a recent phenomenon, but the critical appraisal of such arguments has gained momentum over the last two to three decades. It is by no means a coincidence that this is also the period that has seen a rise in interest in the precepts of ‘historical ecology’ (e.g. Balée 2006; Crumley 1994) and in resilience theory (e.g. Walker et al. 2004), both of which emphasize the need to study social, economic, and environmental factors from a long-term historical perspective in order to fully understand the relationships between them in any given place or time, and both stress the importance of seeing modern landscapes and resource exploitation strategies as legacies of former periods of land-use. More recently, a resurgence in interest in world systems theory—itself formerly influential on developmental thinking via dependency theory (e.g. Frank 1969)—raises similar themes through the notion that most if not all local economies have been influenced by their interaction with broader webs of trade relations at regional and global scales for several centuries (e.g. Hornberg and Crumley 2007).

Applied Archaeology in the Andes: The Contribution of Pre-Hispanic Agricultural Terracing to Environmental and Rural Development Strategies

Patterns of civilization in the Central Andes can be seen to have fluctuated over the last 5,000 years in relation to climate changes. Starting with the first American civilization at Caral, on the Peruvian coast, other impressive coastal centres and cultural areas followed and subsequently the highland cultural areas and civilizations took over in what now seems to have been at least partly a response to periods of climate changes. While the early coastal environment offered economic advantages of maritime resources and made it easy to adapt and benefit from the early arrival of imported cultigens, greater effort was required to develop agriculture from wild local species at high altitudes in rugged terrains. However, by the first millennium BC, following adverse effects of droughts in coastal areas, the highland religious centre at Chavin de Huantar developed an influential impact in the Early Horizon Period (c.500–c.200 BC), expanding through trade networks to adjacent regions and southwards towards Paracas on the southern coast. Following the centre’s demise around 200 BC (due to the increasing impoverishment of the highland environment) impetus returned to a new surge of coastal developments, notably the emergence of the Mochica and Nazca cultures on the northern and southern coasts respectively, and at Pucara in the altiplano. Here Rowe’s chronological system of Intermediate Periods characterized by regional states and Horizon Periods characterized by broader dominating cultures can be seen to be influenced by the swings of past climate. Temperature and precipitation have been shown to be prime influences underlying the sustainability of cultural developments, driven by agricultural developments, at key centres of Andean power (Kendall and Rodríguez 2009),. Early economic and cultural developments centred on Lake Titicaca in the southern altiplano were supported by agricultural systems, including cocha (ponds) networks developed for specialized cultivation (Flores Ochoa and Paz 1986) and camellones or wayru wayru (raised fields) around wetland shores (Erickson 1985).

Burning the Bush: The Development of Australia’s Southwest Botanical Province

Though early historical records frequently mention Aboriginal, or Noongar, firing in south-western Australia, little is known about how the Noongar people managed the vegetation with fire, or the impact this has had on the environment. This study uses interdisciplinary archaeology, with information from ethnographic data, historical records, and pollen records from the last 6,000 years to determine the actions of the Noongar people and demonstrate how the Southwest Botanical Province can be viewed as an artefact of Noongar land management. It is widely accepted that Aboriginal people have had an effect on some of Australia’s vegetation types through fire (Bowman 1998; Hallam 1975; Kershaw et al. 2002) although the extent of the influence of Aboriginal firing is debated (Mooney et al. 2007). However, pollen data and the study of fire indicators in Xanthorrhoea and Eucalyptus trunks have been used to demonstrate that the frequency of fire events in the south-west has decreased since European colonization (Atahan et al. 2004; Ward et al. 2001), resulting in the loss of fire-dependent vegetation species and changes in vegetation distribution patterns. This disruption of the vegetation communities has been compounded by the extensive clearing of land for farming and the displacement of the Noongar people (Dodson 2001). The impact that European colonization had on vegetation becomes more apparent as an understanding of the Noongar fire management practices is gained. There is increasing acknowledgement by researchers of the need to understand the influence of the past fire regime on vegetation patterns and to acknowledge traditional land management practices (Hopper and Gioia 2004), as well as the changes caused by European attempts to create a ‘natural’ regime, so that land management groups can take them into account when determining modern-day prescribed burning timetables. Archaeological studies such as this one can provide a unique insight into the past actions of people such as the Noongar, allowing us to determine how they shaped the landscape prior to European colonization (see Balée, Chapter 3 this volume for a more direct discussion of the ‘indigenous’ nature of pre-colonial landscapes; see Stump, Chapter 10 this volume for similar discussions of colonial and postcolonial environmental narratives).

Is the ‘Environment’ Good to Eat or Good to Paint? Faunal Consumption and Avoidance among Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers in the Beagle Channel Region (Tierra del Fuego, South America)

This chapter discusses some aspects of the multi-dimensional nature of human–environment relationships. It focuses on the interaction established between people and animals in the Beagle Channel region (Tierra del Fuego, South America; Figure 5.1) through an analysis of taxon selection or avoidance in two inter-related spheres: subsistence and ceremonial art. The selection or avoidance of a particular species can be related to environmental, economic, political, and ideological factors, and our aim is to point out which of these factors influenced the high exploitation of certain taxa and the low representation of others. We achieve this by comparing archaeological data with spatially and temporally contemporaneous ethnographic information about the representation of animal species in ceremonial body paintings. Thus, we seek to explain whether the selection of some species and the avoidance of others in the subsistence sphere was being reinforced by or forbidden according to symbolic values that stemmed from the ceremonial sphere. Such questions derive from a theoretical premise that dismisses the notion of absolute optimality in human practices. It proposes instead that people’s actions and decisions are not guided only by rational principles and cost-minimizing aims: they can also be non-rational and non-optimal, and yet can make a socio-economic system function and reproduce efficiently through time and space without collapse. We argue that archaeological techniques and data have much to contribute to an understanding of the complexity of human–environment relations—particularly the ability to critique the overly simplistic economic models that often feed into popular and bureaucratic approaches to human environments. During the last fifteen years, one of the most popular approaches to subsistence in prehistoric and non-industrial societies has been the application of optimality models (e.g. Broughton 1994; Grayson and Delpech 1998; Nagaoka 2002, among others). In principle, these models were conceived as methodological tools through which the researcher lays out a hypothetical scenario of how resources should be consumed if people were trying to minimize costs and maximize benefits towards reaching an optimal result.

Forced Moves or Just Good Moves? Rethinking Environmental Decision-Making among East African Intensive Cultivators

There has been a tendency in archaeology and in related social sciences and humanities to view human cultures as simply ‘adapted’ to or ‘in tune’ with ‘nature’ (Binford 1962; Butzer 1982; Steward 1955a; White 1959). Nature in this view is difficult to define and is principally considered in opposition to culture; it is not culture, it is external to humans, and it has an active causality of its own. This is often true even when researchers have been considering phenomena with a distinctly ‘human’ flavour such as population growth or technological development; both have often been seen as ‘natural’ aspects of human behaviour, as things which ‘just happen’. In such thinking, when human societies are impacted by nature (conceived of as a phenomenon emanating from outside of the human realm) their responsive action or behaviour is often considered to be ‘forced’, in the sense that there is only one way in which society can respond and therefore that the nature of the change is inevitable. The idea that alternative actions might be as appropriate and effective, and equally likely, is given little credence—the specific nature of the response is taken as requisite and the form of the response goes unquestioned: human agency (choice) is given little opportunity to make its mark. Cause and effect are favoured over choice, opportunism, innovation, and dynamic decision making, while the environment is seen as external to culture and shaped by natural rather than cultural forces. Moreover, this logic is self-fulfilling; things occur as they do because the result was inevitable and only one course of action was possible; ergo the problem is solved! Of course I am here describing an extreme position and most researchers today would see a much more dynamic interaction between humans and the natural world. However, unicausal thinking does remain pervasive in popular accounts (Diamond 2005, 1997; Fagan 2007: 16–17; Scarre 2005: 35) and in much influential academic work where technology, environment, and ecology remain prime mover explanations, at least partially at the expense of variable responses, individual agency, politics, and ideology (Algaze 2008: 151–4; Demarest 2004: 27–30; Pollock 1999: 22–5; Webster 2002: 327–43).